Sir Hugh Orde, who narrowly lost out to Sir Paul Stephenson when he last applied for the Met commissioner job. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

At the height of the riots which spread across England in August, one senior police officer lifted his head and shoulders above the fray to tell it straight.

In doing so he earned the praise of rank-and-file police officers, endeared himself to the media and the public but appeared to be running headlong into confrontation with the government.

Sir Hugh Orde's direct approach saw him declare that the return of the home secretary and the prime minister was an "irrelevance" as far as on-the-ground operations were concerned and continue to insist that the decision to increase officers on the street to 16,000 was made by police not politicians.

He had the satisfaction last week of seeing the home secretary, Theresa May, concur with this for the first time but whether her change of mind translates into seeing him as the preferred candidate for commissioner of the Metropolitan police is less clear.

There is a chance, however, that his trademark independence and outspokenness during the riots will be a gamble that pays off.

When Sir Ian Blair resigned from the Met the desire was to appoint a commissioner who would stay out of the public eye and represent continuity and Sir Paul Stephenson was seen as that man. Orde himself came a very close second but lost out, it is thought, because of his strength of character and obvious independence of spirit.

This time round there is no doubting that a strong-willed candidate of change is desired. Politicians know Orde will be able to bring his police officers with him during a period of uncertainty, low morale, budget cuts and fundamental change with the introduction of elected commissioners.

Seen as a reformer, he believes utterly in policing by consent, a key British tradition which the riots seriously threatened. "We have 140,000 officers in this country (and falling), and at the last count 63.5 million people (and rising). You police by consent or you're finished," he said recently.

It was Orde whose voice rang out calmly against the use of baton rounds, when the Met admitted that for the first time outside Northern Ireland they were on the brink of deploying plastic bullets at the height of the disorder last month.

Orde joined the Met in 1977 and was posted to south London when he was made a sergeant in his early 20s. In the 1990s, he developed the force's race relations training. He faced up to the threat of gun crime linked to the drugs trade that had made some parts of London no-go areas and when relations with the black community were at an all-time low, he developed Operation Trident, which has forged strong links with the community and remains one of the most successful operations to combat gun crime.

As chief constable of Northern Ireland between 2002 and 2009 he lost an officer, Stephen Carroll, and witnessed the kind of public disorder seen in August on a regular basis.

He rebuilt morale in the newly formed Police Service of Northern Ireland, and became known as a "policeman's policeman".

After losing out to Stephenson in 2009, he was appointed president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, but is known to find the lack of an operational role deeply frustrating.

"I've always loved the Met," he says. "In policing, it's one of the biggest challenges in the world."